


This Wasn't On My List

by Mercy



Series: Roadtripverse [5]
Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Christmas, M/M, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-17
Updated: 2010-06-17
Packaged: 2017-11-02 16:13:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercy/pseuds/Mercy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan in a Santa suit, Christmas 1998.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Wasn't On My List

**Author's Note:**

> This was for the_reverand, who I made want Santa!Dan. This'll be about 8 months after the end of _One Day We'll Look Back And..._  
> 
>  
> 
> [LJ masterlist for this universe is here.](http://thirstyrobot.livejournal.com/105745.html)  
> 

"C'mon, Dan, please?"

Jones has landed some strange gigs in the time Dan's known him, but this one deserves some sort of fucking award. Surely there are DJs better suited to a children's home Christmas disco, and Jones wouldn't call them DJs. Still, he's waving a white-trimmed red robe and hat and making his eyes enormous and sad. Between that and the yards of glittery wire garland twined up his arms, he looks like something off the Island of Misfit Toys. Jones would probably take that as a compliment.

"Why can't... Bear or...Quidditch do it?"

" _Pony_ 's gotta be an elf, and who the fuck's Quidditch? Sometimes I think you get 'em wrong on purpose."

"I might do better if they had names meant for humans. The round one with the beard. He'd be perfect."

"You mean Wizard. He was gonna, actually, but he's got some sort of infected...you don't wanna know. Seriously, Dan, there's no one else, or I wouldn't ask." Jones drapes the costume over the back of the settee and sits down, folding himself into Dan's side and shamelessly shoving a hand up his shirt, teasing at one of his nipples just a shade too lightly to do any good, the garlands round his wrist scratching against Dan's skin. "Please? All you gotta do is hand out some presents and pretend not to be a complete bastard for half an hour. It ain't a normal set, neither. I might even play something you like."

The 'something you like' is breathed wetly into Dan's ear as Jones's fingers stop teasing and close in a gentle pinch the way he knows _is_ something Dan likes. "Why?" Dan groans. He tries to pull Jones round to face him but Jones is having none of it.

"'Cause I'm asking nice?"

"Manipulating me with sex isn't _nice._ " (It is.)

Dan wrenches Jones's hand out of his shirt, but Jones twists it away easily and reaches down to squeeze Dan's cock through his jeans. "You fuckin' love it," Jones says, half mischief and half lust, dodging away from being kissed in favour of nibbling at Dan's neck along the line where lazy stubble gives way to smooth skin.

Dan spreads his legs a bit wider and leans his head back. "Maybe. But I meant why you're doing it, not why I should."

"I do it every year. You sayin' yes yet or've I gotta blow you?"

"I'm going to look like a twat." Dan grumbles it, but he can't help smiling a bit when Jones climbs astride his lap and beams at him.

"You'll be like a grunge Father Christmas. The kids'll probably think it's well ironic." Jones gives him a kiss, the sort meant to be brief, but Dan catches him round the back of the neck and prolongs it, sucking at Jones's bottom lip until he makes a small high sighing noise and their tongues meet in shallow teasing flutters amid slow slides of lips.

It's times like these that things Dan shouldn't think race through his head and make him dizzy, places they've tacitly agreed not to go, words that aren't for this that Dan pours into fiction instead, scribbled scraps that he blushes at and hides away. The way Jones smiles at him sometimes, like he does now when they finally break apart, makes Dan wonder if it might not be so bad for him to say those things, to ask for them, but the knots in his stomach at the prospect make him not so sure he wants to say them.

What he says instead is, "You can still blow me if you want." It's just easier.

Jones's soft lazy smile that looks like a secret changes to a glittering cheeky one. "Maybe after. I gotta make you behave yourself somehow."

"Fucking tease."

"It'll be good for you. Builds character. Good job you'll be wearing that big drapey robe or you'd look like a dirty paedo even though you're really just havin' a lech at me antlers."

"Antlers."

"Yeah! I'm Rudolph! Got a red nose and all."

There's something oddly appropriate in that. Father Christmas and his pet misfit, the weird one that shines brighter than the rest. "Why _do_ you do this every year?"

Jones's smile fades and he climbs off Dan. "'Cause it's really shit to be stuck in a place like that at Christmas. It's shit anyway, but it's more shit when you're meant to be shaking your presents and getting sick off mince pies."

Dan knows what Jones is saying, but it doesn't make sense. "I thought your grandmother--"

"She got real bad pneumonia this one winter. Spent ages in hospital and nearly didn't make it. And I was only like, thirteen, and she's all the family I got, so...." Jones shrugs and Dan can guess the rest. "I never believed in God or nothing, but they had this big glowy plastic nativity scene in the front garden. I used to sit there and talk to the weird little neon Jesus, and I promised him that if she could be okay, I'd do something to make it better for the other kids."

Dan can see the whole thing, and this might be what it feels like to have your heart break. He can't say anything because it'll be 'you're so fucking brilliant' with too much meaning behind it, so he just pulls Jones to him and holds on as tight as he can. Jones muffles something into his shoulder that might be 'big girl's blouse,' and Dan laughs.

He laughs too, later, at Jones with fucking antlers on his head and a red foam nose and even more garland on his arms. They look like the most massive pair of tits in the universe, Father Christmas and reindeer-man rattling through the tube juggling a flight case and a crate of records, but Jones laughs and pulls faces at everyone who stares, and if he doesn't mind, then Dan doesn't either.


End file.
